Novelists

What lands on a date

• 01-13 James Joyce · Died in Zurich after surgery for a perforated ulcer. source
• 01-21 George Orwell · Died of tuberculosis in London soon after Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared. source
• 01-25 Virginia Woolf · Born in Kensington, London; a central modernist novelist and essayist. source
• 02-02 James Joyce · Irish modernist born in Rathgar, Dublin, on Groundhog Day. source
• 02-07 Charles Dickens · Born in Portsmouth; his serial novels defined Victorian popular fiction. source
• 02-09 Fyodor Dostoevsky · Died in Saint Petersburg shortly after finishing The Brothers Karamazov. source
• 02-18 Toni Morrison · Born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio; Nobel laureate in literature. source
• 02-26 Victor Hugo · French novelist and poet born in Besançon, eastern France. source
• 03-06 Gabriel García Márquez · Colombian novelist born in Aracataca, the setting of Macondo. source
• 03-21 Chinua Achebe · Died in Boston, Massachusetts, after a short illness. source
• 03-28 Virginia Woolf · Died by drowning in the River Ouse near her Sussex home. source
• 04-17 Gabriel García Márquez · Died in Mexico City, the foremost voice of magical realism. source
• 04-21 Mark Twain · Died in Redding, Connecticut, a day after Halley's Comet returned. source
• 04-22 Miguel de Cervantes · Died in Madrid, ten days before Shakespeare, after a long literary career. source
• 04-22 Vladimir Nabokov · Born in Saint Petersburg to a wealthy, liberal Russian family. source
• 05-08 Gustave Flaubert · Died suddenly at Croisset while working on unfinished fiction. source
• 05-22 Victor Hugo · Died in Paris; his funeral drew a vast national procession. source
• 06-03 Franz Kafka · Died of tuberculosis near Vienna, aged forty. source
• 06-09 Charles Dickens · Died at Gad's Hill Place after a stroke, aged fifty-eight. source
• 06-14 Jorge Luis Borges · Died in Geneva, the city where he had studied as a youth. source
• 06-25 George Orwell · Eric Blair born in Motihari, British India. source
• 07-02 Ernest Hemingway · Died at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, by suicide. source
• 07-02 Vladimir Nabokov · Died in Montreux, Switzerland, after a long exile. source
• 07-03 Franz Kafka · Born in Prague to a German-speaking Jewish family. source
• 07-06 William Faulkner · Died of a heart attack in Byhalia, Mississippi. source
• 07-10 Marcel Proust · Born in Auteuil, Paris, to a wealthy bourgeois family. source
• 07-18 Jane Austen · Died in Winchester at forty-one, leaving six completed novels. source
• 07-21 Ernest Hemingway · Born in Oak Park, Illinois; his spare prose reshaped modern fiction. source
• 08-01 Herman Melville · American novelist born in New York City to a merchant family. source
• 08-02 James Baldwin · Born in Harlem, New York; novelist and essayist of race and identity. source
• 08-05 Toni Morrison · Died in the Bronx after a brief illness, aged eighty-eight. source
• 08-24 Jorge Luis Borges · Argentine writer born in Buenos Aires; master of the short fable. source
• 09-09 Leo Tolstoy · Russian aristocrat and novelist born at Yasnaya Polyana. source
• 09-25 William Faulkner · Born in New Albany, Mississippi, and rooted in Southern history. source
• 09-28 Herman Melville · Died in New York, largely forgotten before his later rediscovery. source
• 11-11 Fyodor Dostoevsky · Born in Moscow; his novels probed faith, guilt, and the modern psyche. source
• 11-16 Chinua Achebe · Nigerian novelist born in Ogidi; Things Fall Apart opened African fiction worldwide. source
• 11-18 Marcel Proust · Died in Paris before revising the final volumes of his novel. source
• 11-20 Leo Tolstoy · Died at Astapovo railway station after fleeing his estate. source
• 11-30 Mark Twain · Samuel Clemens born in Florida, Missouri, on the eve of a comet. source

+ 3 more day-precise entries in the corpus.

The year rail

Some lives are known by year, not by day. Those entries are kept on a rail — never placed on a fabricated date.

• Miguel de Cervantes 1547
• Don Quixote 1605
• Pride and Prejudice 1813
• Moby-Dick 1851
• Ulysses 1922
• Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949